Using the Internet to operate in a three dimensional (3D) virtual environment or virtual universe utilizing a computer is a pass-time that is gaining popularity with many. A 3D virtual universe (VU) is an interactive simulated environment provided to a user over a communications network such as the Internet. The VU can be accessed by multiple users, where users can interact through an “online” interface via a user's or a participant's computer. Some VUs provide a game setting where multiple users can compete, fight or build empires or infrastructure in a competitive environment. Users can inhabit and interact in the VU via human type icons, where the VU can be a two or three-dimensional graphical representations of these human type icons often referred to as avatars or “humanoids.” Alternately described, an avatar can be a graphical representation that a user can select to represent himself/herself in the VU that others can see and possibly interact with. An avatar often takes the form of a “cartoon-like” human. Avatars or participant's can typically speak to one another via a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) connection provided by the VU.
Virtual environments or VUs are referred to by many different terms. For example, a virtual environment can be referred to as a “metaverse,” a “3D Internet” a virtual world, and so on. As utilized herein, a virtual universe (VU) is intended to encompass all of these environments where a user can move about and interact with others via a communication network. Although there are many different types of VUs, there are several features many VUs have in common. For example, many VUs have shared space or regions which is a “universe” that allows many users to concurrently participate in an activity. The VU residents or avatars can traverse, inhabit, and interact with other avatars via 3-D graphics and landscapes. Thus, a VU can be populated by many thousands of residents or avatars. Often, the VU resembles the real world in terms of physics or physical laws, houses, and landscapes etc.
Many virtual environments also utilize a graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI can depict the environment or some form of “space” visually, ranging in style from 2D “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environment and the GUI can accept user input. In addition, many virtual environments can provide immediacy, interactivity, and persistence. Immediacy allows interactions between a user's avatar and the environment to take place in real time or based on “wall clock time.” Interactivity with the environment allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content. Persistence provides a continuous environment regardless of whether individual users are logged in.
Many virtual environments also have agents, regions, assets, and textures. An agent can be a software resource which represents some portion of a user in the virtual world. Agents can be hosted in agent servers. An agent may cause an avatar to be instantiated on behalf of a user. An agent can mediate, for the user, by acting as the software endpoint in the system which invokes various services within the web at the user's direction, generally via the user's client. A region can be a defined area within the virtual universe. An asset can be an entity which can be transferred from agent to agent or from agent to region or from region to agent. An asset can be something like an object, texture, sound, link, landmark, and so forth.
The Internet is commonly referred to as the World Wide Web and will be referred to herein as the “Web.” The Web is generally a hypertext-based, distributed information system. Hypertext is generally speaking, text that when selected, can link a user to other documents or another service possibly from other servers. When using a VU a user may want to transition from the VU to an Internet based service provider such as a provider for online commerce and hypertext and browsers make it easy to make this transition. The Web can present the user with documents, called web pages, full of links to other documents or information systems or even links to interactive systems such as VUs. Selecting one of these links, the user can access more information about a particular topic or a move to different mediums such as to VUs or between VUs. Accordingly, Web pages can include text as well as multimedia (images, video, animation, sound). As with VUs, product information can be acquired and purchases can also be made via the Web.
Presently users can be engaged in both a VU medium and browsing and participants commonly move from one medium to the other and back. It is also common for services provided by websites to have associated services existing in a VU. For example, the company “Circuit City” has both a web site and a VU store. Generally, there is limited inter-operability between these two mediums because different mediums typically do not freely exchange information.
Some services support a user's transcendence from the VU to Web sites. For example some services pass information from a VU to a Web site via a universal resource indicator (URI). A URI can be a formatted string of alphanumeric characters that serves as an identifier for a resource, typically on the Internet. URIs can be utilized in HTML code to identify the anchors of hyperlinks. URIs in common practice include Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and relative URLs. Usage of URI's can react to the user selecting or pointing and clicking on a link in the VU to get to the web site.
Within VUs, communication has traditionally been done through text. However increasingly, voice has been utilized as it is a more natural means of communication. In addition for most people, verbal communication is quicker and more efficient than textual communication. However, such a communication format is not always available from service providers.